The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society = The Beatles

I agree that Village Green is an astonishingly fine album, packed with pop gold songs that it seems strange were never capitalized as singles. But I hear many differences between Ray Davies' songs and the psychedelia of McCartney and Lennon.

Take Sgt Pepper's, another album that is of a piece: "Lucy in the Sky," "Good Morning," and "A Day in the Life" are all about the surreal fragmentation of life in Little England. England was still a vastly traditional society built on parishes and counties that touched on the great industrial cities and Swinging London. Lennon/McCartney were often singing about 'modern' life in the suburbs, and they suggest that the core integrities of traditional England are now, and maybe ever were, facades. The pretty nurse selling poppies from a tray to honor the war dead "feels as if she's in a play," and in fact she _is_, but so too are friendly barber, the awkwardly affluent banker (who's getting above himself), and the fireman who loves his "clean machine" almost as much as he loves QEII. The lads were all from teeming, migrant, impoverished Liverpool--one of the places the Irish flocked to in the 40s and 50s to find work. It's a working-class urban perspective [A friend never ceases to remind me that Mick Jagger was a middle-class Londoner who studied a business degree at the London School of Economics].

"We are the VGPS," Ray Davies' opening paeon life in the little village that still has an open, common greenspace--that was once fiercely guarded as communal land for small gardening and pasturage--is a curio cabinet of bits from the Victorian and Edwardian periods, mixed with mother's pills from the chemist's and your favorite comic characters from the Beano. The whole album is about the townies who live in a place that has become so 'quaint' and out-of-touch with Mick Jagger's Swinging England and the impoverished council housing around Waterloo Station that an outsider might see it as a living museum (all us good boojeewah Suth'n boys takin ahwr sweet hunny-brides to see the castles 'n suits of armor 'n all, lookin' round that village an jest bein' tickled, so we says [Ray cleaned it up] "Gawddam, Honee! Ain't it a purty little place!").

What's so great about Davies' assortment of songs is that he looks at the country town from all angles. He loves the things in it that remain sound: your old mum and dad with their picture albums, the real working farm that even crazed twenty-year old stoners can hang out at for a while, Daisy the ex-girlfriend who loves to gossip with you but who's happy with her greengrocer husband, the trainspotters and their pride, a museum-piece steam locomotive still taken out on summer weekends. However, Ray keenly observes how stifling this place can be, and he recognizes that it breeds unsuccessful rebels (Walter) and more successful eccentrics who've found a tolerable place in the community (the Richard Thompson-esque Johnny Thunder, the delightfully Wiccan Wicked Annabella, the far-traveled Cat, who's retired to home). Davies points out that these local people really know him (even as far back as a bare-assed child) and they don't let him get away with the pompous rock-star antics he can affect in London (when he mounts the stage pissed, his friends won't let him forget it--for a while).

Last, he explains that, however much he may love his home town, he can't stay there. He--not Walter, not Daisy--"left the Village Green," and even when he returns for a nice long visit, there's only so much photo-snapping and pouring over the old the old photo albums a modern feller can bear. Eventually, one must say, Mum, Dad, "Don't show me no more, please."

Ray Davies gets it from all the angles, and the delightful, wry, charming, but ultimately limited world of the village green is laid out in all its Vimto and brown-betty splendor. It's not utterly unlike the raw but poppy re-appropriation of 50s rock and roll riffs by the perpetually girlfriend-less and straight persona of Jonathan Richmond a few years later who exclaims that he's "in love with the Modern World!" but also protests that he "still loves the Old World."

I've been wondering the same about The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle, which to my ears is better than Pet Sounds.

I think that the Kinks albums from the sixties are as underrated as the Beatles albums are overrated.
Personally, I take any Kinks LP over any Beatles LP.

Thanks for the great write up!
I feel the same way about them. Their music reflects where they come from and what they went through in life. I lived in Muswell Hill and round the corner from the pub they were supposed to have performed for the first time all those years ago. Muswell Hill was considered countryside in those days and being Edwardian/late Victorian it was seen as a "young" town. When I listen to their music, I could almost see myself traveling back to the time it was written. It is all in the music. A bit like listening to Madness and all of a sudden you are in Camden Town/ London!
Like you said, Mick Jagger is middle class and the Beatles are from up north. They all made music that reflects their own individual life experiences.
I always felt the Kinks sounded more British than either the Stones or the Beatles. Both Rolling Stones and the Beatles had more American influence.
The Kinks are certainly underrated. It is a bit like Big Star not being as big as they should have been.
-Paul

Damn, Paul! Being an Alabama-Cro-mag, I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you were a Muswell Hillbilly, and I'm jealous! I never spent enough time in England, though I lived for years in Dublin. I had a pal whose parents lived in Letchworth Garden City, and that has been the image that comes to mind when I think of TVGPS. I wish I could find the money and a semi-tenable excuse to go back to England.

But I completely agree that with Davies' enthusiasm for music hall melodies and English folk-pop, the Kinks' later albums *are* more distinctively English than the Americana-obsessed Beatles and Stones. I guess that Ray Davies' lyrical talents had the greatest impact on bands formed a decade or more later, like Big Star influenced all the Southern power-pop bands of my misspent 80s youth.

But I'm glad you liked the write-up! Cheers!-Manny

That makes two of us. Well, any Kinks album I own, since I do not have every single one of them. I would also add that while the Kinks albums are underrated by the populus, they are lauded by critics and the cognoscenti, so they are not really underrated in that sense.

We are proud to be Muswell Hillbillies and still have a house there.
By the way, Muswell Hill is such a nice place. Pete Townshend used to have a recording studio in Crouch End which is down the hill from there. Annie Lennox lived there in the 80's and I saw her driving in a pink Mini before (to match her pink hair no doubt). On my way to Highgate tube station there's this little cottage with the blue plaque that says: "Peter Sellers used to live here." Charles Dickens and Karl Marx used to be residents in the area too! If you go a bit further south past Hamstead you get to St John's Wood. You can then walk on the zebra crossing on Abbey Road pretending to be one of the Beatles.
These days I need a good reason to visit London too! For a family of four it will cost me over $4000 just to fly from San Francisco to London and back.
I do miss London.
-Paul

I am just glad the record was made the way it was- the Britishness; no chart topping potential singles; the nostalgic quality....
I still don't know why they were banned.

Ray took a swing at a music union agent while on tour in the US. You know he was about the music business. e.g "I gave them Waterloo Sunset - what else could they want"?

- Ed

Village Green is arguably their masterpiece but it's not what most US fans think of when it comes to the Kinks. That would belong to Lola or You really got me.

I also think that Lola unfortunately puts them in the "novelty" category for the most casual fans and that's a real shame.

I have listening a lot to the only official career spanning box set of the Kinks- Picture Book. It's a great set and makes their case as one of the great bands.

I think one reason they have not been as big as they might otherwise is that i think they have limited appeal to women especially compared to the Beatles.

It's strictly anecdotal, but all the boys in my friends/family love the kinks and the girls are mostly meh...

I was trying to think of some unique way to contribute to the thread, but its all been said, really.

The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society is one of my most favorite albums; top 10, perhaps top 5 for sure.

There's two kinds of people in this world... Kinks people and Beatles people. Now Beatles people can like Kinks. And Kinks people can like the Beatles. But nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice. And that choice tells me who you are.

I'm a Kinks man myself.

I always understood the world to be divided into Beatles people and Stones people.